Thursday, April 13, 2017

#Wikidata - People die; implications for another #policy approach

People die, notable people die. It is natural and it happens all the time. Many a #Wikipedia has a category for the people who died in a specific year. Such categories are what makes a wonderful tool by Pasleim tick. It shows those Wikidata items that have no date of death while a Wikipedia knows about the demise of the person involved.

This is a wonderful tool; it allows Wikidata to take care of those who died and update its data. It leaves us with another option and add one more tool. A tool that checks if the date of death exists in the Wikipedias that do not have such a category.

Consider this; a date of death is relevant when you consider the "Biographies of Living People". Having complete information for people is important. So why not flip our approach to the BLP and provide tools to improve the existing information in all of our projects?

First things first; the objective is to signal the death of a person. As is the current policy, it is up to every project to do with it as it likes. What should follow is looking for sources when one is available and preferably add at least one to Wikidata for re-use.

What are the benefits; a positive approach to maintenance and invite people to do something that actually matters now. It is an invitation to read the article and see what more can be done to get in into shape.

When the date for a death exists in an article, the article will be removed from the articles that need attention. There are plenty of valid approaches to this.

Improving user engagement is one of the objectives of the Wikimedia Foundation itself. I really want the WMF to include active engagement where it makes a difference and be as pro active as it can in this field. This is a positive approach and that is what we badly need.
Thanks,
GerardM